In order to help citizens and businesses to fully benefit from the opportunities offered by the Single Market, the European Commission published on 21 February a strategy to improve governance of the single market. To achieve this general objective, the strategy provides for the expansion of the Internal Market Information (IMI) system to other areas of EU law such as, potentially, gambling and e-commerce will help to achieve this.

The Internal Market Information (IMI) system is a multilingual online application which allows national, regional and local authorities to communicate quickly and easily with their counterparts elsewhere in the EU. In August 2010, IMI already counted with 5.000 authorities already using the system and by December 2010 they were nearly 6.000 authorities assisting each other in order to, for example, process applications from foreign professionals, grant permissions or check that cross-border service providers comply with security obligations.

Key elements of the proposed strategy to improve Single Market governance

• Adding new policy areas to IMI: IMI currently facilitates administrative cooperation for the recognition of professional qualifications (Directive 2005/36/EC) and for services (Directive 2006/123/EC). It has been designed from the outset as a flexible system that can easily be customised to support administrative cooperation required by all sorts of single market legislation. There is great interest to expand IMI to other areas of cross-border cooperation, like, for example, gambling and e-commerce.
• Further development of IMI functionality: In the long run IMI should become a comprehensive toolkit for any type of administrative cooperation. To this end, the Commission will explore adding functionality to IMI that will allow its use, for example, for notification procedures (in many areas such as the Services Directive and the e-commerce Directive, Community law obliges Member States to notify national measures to each other and/or to the Commission).
• Synergies with existing IT tools: IMI also has the potential to complement the functionality of existing IT systems and vice versa. Synergies could be achieved by linking IMI up with systems that are used by the same user groups, such as the Regulated Professions Database. For example, different IT systems could be made accessible with a single login, or data entered into one system could be automatically updated in the other. This could save time and trouble for users.

In the first half of 2011 the Commission will submit a proposal for a legislative instrument to govern the operation of IMI. This instrument is needed in order to consolidate the current rules on IMI and to create a comprehensive data protection framework. This has been requested by the European Data Protection Supervisor in order to provide a higher level of legal certainty to IMI, especially in view of further expansion.